Edtech company Unacademy lays off another 150 employees
India Today
Unacademy has laid off employees primarily from the Group’s core business, Unacademy, and PrepLadder, the sources said.
In a fresh round of layoffs, popular edtech company Unacademy has parted ways with over 150 employees citing poor performance. The company has laid off employees from the sales and operations departments, Inc42 has exclusively learnt. The edtech startup is reportedly assisting the affected employees with outplacement.
As per Inc42 report, Unacademy has laid off employees primarily from the Group’s core business, Unacademy, and PrepLadder, the sources said. The company cited poor performance as the reason behind the ouster of the employees as it is trying to become more profitable.
The second round of layoffs seems to have taken place two months after Unacademy laid off close to 10 per cent of its workforce, which accounts for almost 600 full-time and contractual employees across departments. Unacademy has confirmed the fresh round of layoffs but has refused to call it a “layoff”.
In a statement to the publication, the edtech startup said, “Unacademy has not conducted any layoffs, and we strongly deny the information as it is factually incorrect. The company is built on a culture of high performance and transparency, and a key aspect of that is the transparency and objectivity of our performance appraisal process. Based on the outcome of the recent appraisal, a very small fraction of the workforce (~2.6%) was put on a performance improvement program, as is common for any organisation of our size and scale. The departure of these employees is a result of PIP, which is standard practice in all organisations.”
Unacademy is amongst the many Indian startups that are finding it hard to survive in the market. Another edtech company, Vedantu, too, had let go of around 424 employees.. The company CEO, Vamsi Krishna, had informed the employees about layoffs through an email.
In the blog post, Krishna stated that “out of 5900 Vedans, 424 of our fellow teammates i.e ~7% of our company, will be parting with us.” “This has been an extremely difficult call to make, and I want each Vedan to understand why V had to take this call and what it means to you and the future of Vedantu,” Krishna said. In the first round of layoffs, Vedantu fired over 200 employees and in the second round, the number of employees who lost their jobs went up to 424.
